In December, Monicapredicted that newly controlled Republican legislatures would slash anti-poverty programs. According to a new report from CLASP, several states are looking at a particularly inefficient, costly, and likely unconstitutional way of doing this: drug testing of recipients of government aid.
Yesterday, news broke that the GOP-controlled Congress, rather than waste their time trying to keep Title X family-planning funds from going to Planned Parenthood, will go ahead and just eliminate family-planning funding across the board.
Bryan Howard, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Arizona. Howard has notified the FBI that at least 12 of its health centers were visited recently by a man purporting to be a sex trafficker.
Earlier this week, a reporter from The Bill O'Reilly Show confronted a Planned Parenthood spokesman about videotapes that reveal the organization "excusing and covering up underage sex trafficking." Bill O'Reilly himself reminded his audience of the requirement to report abuse of minors. He failed to mention, however, that that's exactly what Planned Parenthood did, two weeks ago, when it first received mysterious, surreptitiously videotaped visits from men and women posing as pimps and prostitutes. Fox's accusations completely ignored the facts.
With all the talk over the individual mandate and health-care reform, oral argument in Shelby County v. Holder yesterday in the D.C. federal court got little attention. The Alabama county of Shelby is challenging the constitutionality of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which requires designated local and state governments to get approval from the Department of Justice or courts before changing any voting laws or procedures.
As predicted, after a dozen strange visits to Planned Parenthood clinics across the country, the anti-abortion group Live Action yesterday released a video (then an unedited version) that purports to catch a Planned Parenthood staffer at a New Jersey clinic aiding a child sex trafficker. As I wrote on Monday, the video release is well-timed to anti-abortion efforts in Congress.
